Broken Strings
by larkgrace
Summary: In which all her strings break, and she falls, but not really. Zia-centric one-shot.


**I should probably warn certain people (NADYA) right now that this contains relatively minor spoilers for **_**The Serpent's Shadow.**_** But I'm assuming almost everyone else has read it.**

**Anywho, I finished reading **_**Paper Towns **_**yesterday (PSA: anything John Green writes is worth reading) and I started thinking that Margo's strings all broke, and she died except she didn't, it was the old Margo who died and then my brain went HELLO EARTH TO IDIOT and this happened. In just two days, and I'm kind of proud of myself for that. Two thousand words in two days ain't bad, man. Also, this is more Zia-centric and not as Zarter-ish, which is how it wound up here instead of in one of my drabbledumps.**

**I don't own anything that should have a copyright symbol.**

O-o-O

'_Little, adorable nine-year-old me and my even littler and more adorable playdate found a guy with blood pouring out of his mouth, and that blood was on her little, adorable sneakers as we biked home._

_[…]_

"_I think maybe I know why," she finally said._

"_Why?"_

"_Maybe all the strings inside him broke," she said.'_

-_Paper Towns, _John Green.

*#*#*

Zia Rashid wakes up confused, in pain, and almost incapable of speech. There is an old man in front of her, and she knows his face although she doesn't remember why for the longest time. And when she does, she recalls the smoke and the heat and the unbearable burning, and suddenly her back ignites and she feels like someone has set the sheets underneath her alight and she whimpers.

"My name is Iskandar, dear," the old man says. "How are you feeling?"

"Hurts," she croaks, but her throat has been roasted by the smoke and her voice is gravelly. She tries to arch her back to remove the pressure on the burns she can feel pulsing, broiling her alive, but the movement makes the pain flair even worse and with a cry she falls back onto the bed.

She wants to ask where her family is, where Mommy and Daddy are and if they're hurt real bad, when they'll come here and take her back home, but the old man seems to know her question before she asks it and he takes her hand and says, "My girl, I'm sorry to say this, but you are the only one who made it here."

She doesn't understand for a moment, too caught up in wondering where _here _is, but then it starts to sink in and she wonders how this old man could let them get lost, and why isn't he looking for them, and then—

Mommy and Daddy aren't coming back to get her because they aren't here.

Because they're dead.

She doesn't cry. She doesn't scream. She breaks, and she does what all broken people do to get better.

She rests.

She sleeps.

* * *

_snip snip snip snip snip snip snip snip snip snip snip snip_

* * *

She is ten years old and she is going to die, she's going to die, she's going to die because this man who is not a man has her by the throat and he's strangling her with that strength that can only come from hosting a god. She kicks and struggles and finally she gets a grip on his face, and she can't control it, but she feels her skin flare with heat and the possessed man staggers back, his cheeks smoking and blistered from her fire. She hits the ground hard and crumples to her knees and she sends out jets of flame again and again, frying his legs and he falls.

She's not aware of her hands moving. She doesn't feel herself tear the wire free of the crumbling wall. She doesn't command her legs to move so that she's behind the man. She doesn't tell herself to stretch the wire across his thick neck and pull.

She doesn't know what she's done until she sees the blood on her fingers and the body on the floor, and then it's too late to stop herself.

She's too late and she's a murderer.

She watches this innocent man's blood drip off her fingers and onto the concrete floor, and then she runs.

* * *

_snip snip snip snip snip snip snip snip snip snip_

* * *

Zia is eleven and she _hates _wearing dresses.

This dress is the worst yet. It's itchy and it has a collar that chokes her when she tries to take a deep breath, and although Anne Grissom insists she's as pretty as a picture she feels stupid.

She looks in the mirror as Anne tells her not to fidget, to hold her chin high and smile like a proper young lady would, because so _many _people have heard of her and Iskandar is so proud and she must be presentable. She doesn't listen. She's too busy trying to figure out who this person in the mirror is, with her lacy dress and curly hair stiff with hairspray and dark lipstick and eye shadow. She looks like a little porcelain doll. Now all she needs is a far-flung shelf where she can gather dust.

She swings her feet, hitting the bed frame with her shiny shoes that pinch her toes and click when she walks. Anne finishes pinning her hair back just so, and tells her to smile nice and wide.

Zia does. She smiles with her teeth too white against the lipstick, because she knows Anne means well.

Another lady named Lilah appears—a friend of Anne's—and pronounces Zia to be the picture of loveliness.

Her smile wavers. She feels like a picture. She feels stagnant.

The two women tut as they spot a pencil-thin scrape over her eyebrow, left over from some tussle weeks ago, almost healed now. They pull out yet more makeup and cover up the miniscule crack in Zia's perfect porcelain skin.

She slides off the bed and smoothes out her too-poofy skirt. She takes Anne's hand and follows her down the hall, to the party, with so many picture-perfect men and women smiling and laughing for the cameras. Her shiny black toe-pinching shoes clack against the stones and she puts a rhythm with the sound, a spring in her step that makes her too-curly hair bounce.

She smiles and laughs and talks and keeps her hands away from her face so she won't wipe away the makeup covering the tiny little crack.

* * *

_snip snip snip snip snip snip snip snip_

* * *

Zia is thirteen and she is totally alone.

She stands in the middle of her bedroom—_her _bedroom, in _her _apartment, these rooms that are all hers, no space to share with the other girls in the initiates' dorms. There is another set of rooms up the stairs, but they are unoccupied because no one ever stays here anymore. It's just her rattling around in this building.

She takes off her shoes so she doesn't hear the echo of her feet as she wanders around.

There is a knock at the door, and it takes her a moment to realize that she must answer it, because there is no one else. She opens it.

Iskandar is smiling his wrinkled, crooked grin that makes him seem so much younger than he is. "Zia," he says.

She gives him a short bow. "Master."

He ruffles her hair. "None of that," he tells her. "Are you settling in well?"

"Fine."

He nods. "Are you sure you will be alright on your own, dear?"

She can't help but smile. He's always acted more like a doting grandmother than an all-powerful magician. "I like being alone. It's fine."

The lie falls so easily off her silk-smooth tongue. She's become accustomed to it.

* * *

_snip snip snip snip snip snip_

* * *

Zia Rashid is fourteen, and she is prepared to commit murder.

And despite the fact that most of her thoughts are consumed with hot red blood flowing from an innocent neck, and the nausea and self-disgust that will surely overcome her, she _does _have enough sense to duck out of the way when the Red Lord vanishes with an explosive flair. Desjardins, however, does not, and gets clipped across the temple with a shard of stone, which will surely result in a spectacular bruise. His sharp glare expresses his desires far better than words could.

They pick their way across the room, dodging piles of flaming debris, and she kneels over the boy first, drawing her knife. He moans feebly but doesn't try to resist her.

She hates him for this, for not resisting. Isn't he going to fight his oncoming death? Only cowards die without fighting.

"We must act quickly," she tells Desjardins, and though under less serious circumstances he would remind her with his usual annoying pomp that he is her superior, now he just places his hand on her shoulder.

"Not yet," he says. "We must be sure before we destroy them."

She wants to protest—these children are _Kanes, _they are dangerous, they need to be annihilated—but she looks down again, at the boy with blood beading at his hairline, unconscious and unaware of the knife hovering over his throat.

She sighs and rams the blade back into her belt. "Fine," she says. "Let's go."

They run.

* * *

_snip snip snip snip snip_

* * *

Zia Rashid is fifteen, she realizes. She missed her birthday while she was entombed.

This thought is so ill-timed, and she has to shake it away, because she must have her wits about her if she wants to survive today.

She refocuses on the line of magicians in front of her, these familiar faces twisted with bloodlust. Negotiation probably won't work with this bunch; but then she knew that from the beginning. She only hopes to minimize the bloodshed.

She hears soft mumbles as someone shoves their way through the ranks, and then not five feet away stands a boy—well, more of a man now—named Keto, who is only older than her by a few years. They trained together. They sparred. He'd laughed along with her when she tripped over her own staff as a child.

"Zia!" he exclaims. "Vladimir hadn't told us he sent _you!"_

He sounds so excited at the prospect of fighting alongside her again, of beating down a mutual enemy while he laughs his signature manic laugh, and he doesn't look like an enemy. He looks like someone who raised her. He looks like someone who used to kiss her forehead when she was sick or injured or scared, like someone who made faces at her from across the room when they were in the middle of some dreadfully boring ceremony. And she knows it would be _so _easy to turn around right now, to stand beside him and take down Brooklyn House, just like she'd wanted to for years.

But she can't. Carter is trusting her to defend his home when he can't.

She can't watch someone else lose their home.

So she says, "He didn't send me."

Keto is confused for a second, and that second is all she needs and she jumps on the chance, because his older and wiser fellows are not so shocked and they will attack in mere moments. She leaps forward and drives her shoulder into his ribcage.

And he falls.

* * *

_snip snip snip_

* * *

Zia is fifteen-almost-sixteen, and the world is ending.

But no it won't, she won't let it, she won't let him die, and she bolts around the wheelhouse just as the axe-headed demon prepares to swing—

She fires, and Bloodstained Blade is incinerated.

Carter is momentarily confused, staring at the axe head impaled between his feet, but then his face lights up when he spots her even though he looks like death.

She smiles back.

* * *

_snip_

* * *

Zia is battered and bruised and exhausted and happy. She is sitting on a black sand beach in hell, in the most literal sense of the word, eating a disgusting protein bar and drinking funky-tasting water from a dusty and dented plastic bottle.

Carter is sitting up next to her, his cuts healing, trying to assure her that she is stronger and braver and more important than she feels, but she can't really focus on his words. She takes another bite of cardboard-flavored granola.

"This tastes like Styrofoam," she says.

"Yeah," he agrees, rubbing the back of his neck. "Not as good as Macho Nachos. I still owe you that date—" he blushes "—at the mall food court."

She laughs at his embarrassment. "I wish we could do that right now," she says, and she thinks she's never meant any words more than she meant those. She wants to be done with the apocalypse and psychotic ghosts. She wants to be sitting in the middle of a crowded food court across the table from Carter Kane. She wants to eat disgustingly greasy food while he tells bad jokes that are actually sort of funny, although she doesn't think he realizes it.

"Usually girls aren't so eager to go out with me," he confesses. "Um, not that I've ever asked—"

She leans forward on an impulse—

* * *

_snip._

* * *

—and she kisses him.

O-o-O

**Uh-oh, I'm about to make you do some math.**

**You probably didn't count the snips, so I'll tell you: twelve plus ten plus eight plus six plus five plus three plus one plus one. You're probably too lazy to do that math, so I'll also tell you that it adds up to forty-six.**

**On a totally unrelated note, the average human cell usually contains twenty-three pairs of chromosomes. Twenty-three times two also equals forty-six and—WHOA. Forty-six snips and forty-six chromosomes. Forty-six little strings of DNA that make us who we are.**

…**wait, did she say strings? You bet she did.**

**All of Zia's strings broke, and she stopped being the harsh Zia that we saw in the first two books because that Zia died, and she became a new Zia. A new person with new metaphorical DNA. **

**So yeah, that was my attempt at symbolism, and now that that's done I have to summon the energy to go make pizza. Mmm, pizza…(lookin at you John Green).**

**Please, no favoriting without reviewing.**


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